House of Secrets

Seldom in the annals of modern true crime has a father exerted such a depraved influence on his children. Eddie Lee Sexton's control was so total that he was actually able to order his kids to commit cold-blooded murder. On an October night in 1993, at one of the campgrounds dotting Florida's Gulf Coast, Sexton told his daughter Pixie to silence her crying baby. It seems almost inconceivable, but the young mother obediently smothered her helpless eight-month-old infant son. Two days later, the tiny corpse - a rattle in his hand and a pacifier in his mouth - was stuffed inside a gym bag and buried in a shallow grave, just a few feet from the family's campsite. Less than a month later, the Sexton patriarch would issue another homicidal command. To stop the dead baby's father, Joel Good, from going to the authorities, Eddie Lee ordered son Willie to strangle the bereaved dad during a family picnic. Pixie, so under her father's thumb that she had already committed infanticide, reportedly helped cover up husband Joel's murder. Sexton was priming his third victim when the FBI and Florida cops finally caught up with him. After the ensuing investigation sparked a six-hour standoff with local cops, Sexton took his family on the run. When it was finally over, he and other members of the Sexton clan would be linked with crimes ranging from fraud, arson, extortion, and armed robbery, to conspiracy, child abuse, incest, and murder. By early 1995, Sexton would be sitting on death row, waiting for a date with Florida's electric chair.